On Tuesday Rishi Sunak became the third Conservative prime minister of Britain this year, elevated to the nation’s highest political office with the endorsement of fewer than 200 lawmakers — an easy hurdle if one compares it to the tens of millions of voters who would need convincing in a general election.
Mr. Sunak and the members of his party clearly hope the trials of the last few weeks and Liz Truss’s premiership are behind them; that the new prime minister can, with his newly reshuffled cabinet, get on with the business of governing.
But as everyone at the top table has been switching seats, the British people are experiencing high inflation and a harsh decline in living standards. To live in Britain now is to feel like nothing works: not the National Health Service, not the railways, and not even work itself, where wage increases are vastly outstripped by the price of almost everything.
To this, Mr. Sunak has warned of “difficult decisions to come,” which many assume involves more spending cuts and austerity. The Conservative Party is markedly unpopular and seemingly out of ideas. Little wonder then that Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labor Party, keeps saying, “General election now.” After 12 years in opposition, Labor finally looks ready to seize the moment.
Mr. Starmer has reason for confidence. In a YouGov poll from Oct. 20, before Mr. Sunak was installed, 63 percent of respondents thought that a general election should be called once a leader had been chosen. And another, also from last week, suggested that if a general election were held now, Labour would take 56 percent of the vote, enough to give it an enormous majority. There are many other examples.
But if the party seems now to have the advantage, it’s taken a long time to get here. Recent Labor history has been characterized by about as much political volatility as that of the governing party. From 2015 until 2020, Labor was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran of the party’s left wing, whose social democratic platform was never taken remotely seriously by the British press, even when the party had a strong showing in the 2017 election. Then in the 2019 election, Labor was routed by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his facile “oven-ready” Brexit deal; Mr. Corbyn got the blame.
After that election, Mr. Corbyn’s net favorability ratings were minus 50. Labor needed a leader who, quite simply, looked more plausible. To its members, charged with choosing Mr. Corbyn’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer looked like that man.
Mr. Starmer rose from a relatively humble background to become a barrister and, in 2008, head of the Crown Prosecution Service. By 2015 he’d been awarded a knighthood for services to the law and had become a Labor member of Parliament. By April 2020 he was the party’s leader.
If Mr. Corbyn’s beliefs were thought variously to be too strident, too left wing or simply too alienating to average voters, Mr. Starmer’s have been difficult to pin down. Critics point to his record running the Crown Prosecution Service, where he defended the Human Rights Act against Conservative proposals to repeal it, but also declined to pursue a case against a police officer for the death of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who died after being pushed to the ground during protests in London. When Mr. Starmer became Labor leader, he promised to retain many of his predecessor’s policies — yet within months, Mr. Starmer appeared to have torn up the lot without a suggestion of what would replace them. The clunky slogan, “Security, Prosperity, Respect” seemed to sum up his stiff, lawyerly presentation that was also thin on substance.
And the party itself has a perception problem that long predates Mr. Starmer and Mr. Corbyn. It has always struggled — with the anomalous exception of Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007 — to look at ease in government.
But something changed this September. At its annual party conference Labor finally looked like a party with plans: to invest in the N.H.S., to create a sovereign wealth fund for green investment, to nationalize railways and create a publicly owned energy company that would run on clean power.
While the conference was still going on, Ms. Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced the budget that crashed the pound. Right at the moment that the Conservatives were losing the economic credibility on which they have exhaustively relied, Labor was starting to look like a plausible alternative.
To be clear, even if there is an appetite for an election soon, the chances of one remain relatively low. In Britain parliamentary terms last a maximum of five years from the date the government is formed — even if the leader of the government changes — so another election is not legally required until January 2025. The most straightforward route to an early election would be for the prime minister to call one, but since polling suggests a wipeout for his party, that is improbable. More likely is that, with Mr. Sunak now appointed, the Conservative Party will attempt to push through and improve its electoral chances before the clock runs out.
We’ll have to watch and see — these are improbable times. But after over a decade of Conservative government, austerity, Brexit, a pandemic and four prime ministers, Mr. Starmer spoke for many yesterday when he urged Mr. Sunak to call a general election, and “let working people have their say.” Sooner or later, working people will.
The New York Times
